Jack O'Connor

I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point.

19 years ago, a high school basketball coach put his team manager into a game for the final four minutes. The kid had never played a single minute of competitive basketball in his life. He scored 20 points. Jason McElwain was diagnosed with severe autism at age two. He didn’t speak until he was five. He couldn’t chew solid food until he was six. He wore a nappy for most of his early childhood. As a baby, he was rigid, wouldn’t make eye contact, and hid in corners away from other children. He tried out for his school basketball team every year and got cut every time. Too small. Too slight. Barely 5’6 and about 54 kilograms. But he loved the game so much that his mum called the school and asked if there was any way he could be involved. The coach created a team manager role for him. For three years, McElwain showed up to every practice and every game. He wore a shirt and tie on match days. He ran drills, handed out water, kept stats, and cheered every basket like he’d scored it himself. On 15 February 2006, the last home game of his final school year, the coach let him suit up in a proper jersey and sit on the bench. With four minutes left and a comfortable lead, the coach sent him in. His first shot missed. His second missed. Then something shifted. He hit a three-pointer. Then another. Then another. His teammates stopped shooting entirely and just kept passing him the ball. He hit six three-pointers and a two-pointer. 20 points in four minutes. The highest scorer in the game. When the final buzzer went, the entire crowd rushed the court and lifted him onto their shoulders. His mum tapped the coach on the shoulder, in tears. “This is the nicest gift you could have ever given my son.” McElwain won the ESPY Award for Best Moment in Sports that year, beating out some of the biggest names in professional sport. He’s 36 now. He works at a local supermarket, coaches basketball, has run 17 marathons including five Boston Marathons, and travels the country speaking about never giving up. When asked about that night, his coach still gets emotional. “For him to come in and seize the moment like he did was certainly more than I ever expected. I was an emotional wreck.”

People hate the tone of this piece, but my view is you don't need a journalist to tell you wrong things are wrong. (She does also call her thieving friends nihilists.) It's weird to be surrounded by thieves though -- if people I know steal from Whole Foods, they don't admit it.

for years, society was limited to only 16 syrup squares per waffle but with recent combinatorial optimization breakthroughs our research department has achieved previously unheard of densities of waffle syrup

Interesting: NY bill would prohibit AI chatbots from giving legal advice. SB 7263, which passed the Internet & Technology Committee last week, says: "A proprietor of a chatbot shall not permit such chatbot to provide any substantive response, information or advice, or take any action, which, if taken by a natural person: ... would violate ... law prohibiting the practice or appearance as an attorney-at-law without being admitted and registered ...." The bill provides a private right of action with mandatory attorneys' fees.

We've been loyal to SHA-256 and MD5 for so long it almost feels wrong to question them. But loyalty doesn't scale when you're staring down terabytes of data files to hash during traige. That's where BLAKE3 comes in and brother, this thing is not joking.

DHS spent today replying to individual tweets saying they left this man in a coffee shop "determined to be a warm, safe location" only for video to emerge tonight showing it was the middle of the night, cold and the coffee shop was closed.